STEWARDING GOD'S CREATION

Reducing Our Energy Footprint

GET STARTED Take the Sustainability Survey

OVERVIEW

What is your congregation’s energy footprint?

You congregation’s decisions and daily activities have an impact on the climate. Buildings consume significant amounts of energy over time in a variety of formats. Understanding and measuring a building’s energy consumption, cost and carbon is a first step toward reducing our burden on the planet. A building’s Energy Usage Intensity (EUI) is calculated as energy use per square foot per year, measured in kBTUs.

There are four types of energy that can have an impact:

Electricity (measured in kWh)
Gas (measured in kBTUs)
Water (measured in gallons)
Waste (measured in cubic feet)

What about carbon footprint?

A carbon footprint is the total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions produced by your congregational activities. A total carbon footprint includes the above building consumption energy (such as HVAC systems and stoves) in addition to other related activities including transportation and food & agriculture.

ENERGY FOOTPRINT

Why manage it?

There are many reasons to manage and reduce your congregation's energy footprint.

For the Earth

For People

For Resources

Reduce environmental impact

Address global warming

Care for creation

Create safe environments

Promote health and wellness

Care for children and future generations

Maximize efficiency

Minimize waste

Generate cost savings

HOW TO START

Resources, Tools and Benefits

Resources and tools to assist your congregation:

Metrics and data-driven, visualized insights
Recommendations for solutions both short- and long-term, prioritizing those with highest impact
Monitoring, reporting and case study development to share results

Benefits to your congregation:

Generates cost savings and ROI with year-over-year improvement
Frees church funds to be prioritized to other ministries or initiatives
Makes it easy to take action toward sustainable environment
Saves time and effort in finding resources
Informs and demonstrates diligent operational and financial stewardship in use of funds
Provides a way for the church body to participate in Caring for Creation initiatives

WHAT IS THE PATH?

How to reduce energy footprint with EnergyPrint

Discovery

First, we determine and share your goals for reducing your energy footprint. We'll assess your status and take a look at any progress to date. Finally, we'll profile your building(s) and systems to understand what first steps to take. - Profile your building(s) and systems

Data Collection & Benchmarking

By signing on with EnergyPrint, you'll gain access to a number of solutions. Using your utility bills, EnergyPrint will start tracking electric and gas for your full building, with an option for water and waste tracking as well. EnergyPrint will then steward your data by authorizing your utility data with your utility provider, gathering 12 months of data history, and collecting monthly data straight from your provider. You'll also be given access to the EnergyPrint dashboard to visualize and analyze your energy data. Finally, EnergyPrint will create an ENERGY STAR® account on your behalf, onboard your data to their Portfolio Manager and track your score.

Analysis & Insights Review

EnergyPrint will assign an Account Service Representative to you to assist in onboarding and training as well as annually review your building performance metrics, trends and best practices. Additionally, EnergyPrint will benchmark your buildings against other similar structures to compare it's performance. Periodic check-ins will also occur to affirm and potentially update your Discovery goals.

Energy Audit

An energy consultant audit will perform a comprehensive energy audit onsite, including a facility walkthrough. This will include an assessment of contributing factors to your energy consumption.

Action Plan

Coming out of the Energy Audit, we'll prepare an action plan that meets your Discovery goals. This will include a findings report with recommended actions prioritized for short-term and long-term cost and impact. The report will also include projected energy savings and an estimate of the payback timeframe. The action plan will also facilitate discussions around financing, incentives and implementation of solutions.

Monitoring & Progress Reporting

Monitoring will include ongoing data capture, scoring and reporting with metrics covering consumption, cost and carbon metrics.

Education & Outreach

Finally, resources will be provided, including education & coaching tools. There will also be opportunities for the development of case studies to share your successes and methods with others as a model for responsible creation care for the community.

METRICS/ACTIONS

Our utility data services are second to none

There are other ways to collect data, but none are as accurate, timely or easy as ours. See what makes our data collection and delivery service exceptional.

Utility expertise

We gather data directly from utility companies — thousands of them. And we’ll admit that sometimes it’s not easy. Through our experience, however, we know how to investigate and resolve data collection processes with utility companies. Plus, we’ll do it all behind the scenes, so there’s no interruption for your billing department.

Data integrity

We guarantee >99% accuracy of the data we collect. We have processes that ensure we parse utility bill data correctly and normalize multiple utility statements across service periods. And when it comes to serving up data, we’ll customize our delivery to match your needs avoiding hours of manipulation.

Data gap resolution

Because of our comprehensive process, we do find data gaps and errors. And if we do, we’ll proactively work with the utility to gather corrected data and facilitate the onboarding of new meters and accounts to fill those gaps.